I Hope You Have an Unproductive Day.

If you're feeling like crap today, I hope that you don't manage to follow through on whatever it is you've got planned for yourself. I want to be pretty direct here today on this. If you're feeling terrible, if you're feeling massive resistance, if you're feeling like you need to really push yourself and, you know, there's no taking no for an answer and no excuses and there's just harshness there. And you're feeling massive internal resistance to it. I actually hope that you don't get to follow through and do what it is that you want, that you planned for yourself. Sounds a little bit heartless of me to say it, but actually I think if that's what happens and you don't end up following through on that plan, that arduous, difficult, overwhelming plan, it's the best thing that could happen for you. The tendency, you know, I had this myself for many years, would be to be resilient, to really double down, to commit, to push through the resistance, to taking action. And it took me quite a long time, really, many years, to get good at the skill of surrendering, to not bulldozing, to come out of denial about the fact that I wasn't feeling good, I wasn't feeling aligned, and... Giving myself permission to say that's enough. Stop now. I need to go back here to revisit something because something's off instead of going ahead with that strategy. And I'm not saying that that means we give up. What I'm saying is I would advocate that we replace that strategy with the strategy of going into reflection to try to understand what that resistance is all about. Because The resistance is information. It's trying to tell us something. It's showing a conflict we have within ourselves. Personal productivity, our day-to-day life, going after our goals, shouldn't feel like you're fighting with yourself constantly. And the way to do that is to not give up on your goals. It's to look at the conflict and understand it and resolve the conflict and then step in to take an action. So the conflict within ourselves It can seem like a pretty overwhelming thing to look at. Maybe that's why we don't look at it. We think we can't solve it or it's unsolvable or too complicated or too abstract or too invisible or unseen, right? But there are ways to figure out why am I feeling bad here? Now, the one that I focus on a lot, there's many reasons why it could be, but the big one typically is that we feel overwhelmed. We draw up these huge elaborate plans, which, by the way, come from a place of low self-esteem or a sense of low potency, which means I have to now compensate in my life by doing all these massive things, Herculean challenges, hero's journey, overcome all the odds and manage to somehow pull off a miracle. We try that, we become overwhelmed, it doesn't work. And then there's usually what happens is self-directed anger at the end of it all. Very occasionally, you might be able to pull off the plan. But usually that leaves you in sort of a flat feeling, didn't actually lead you to what you wanted. Actually, I think what really is going on there is we resent what we've just put ourselves through on some level. But what I'm advocating for is that we slow down and become more deliberate and reflective about the way we are relating to ourselves. And that is not about some perfect plan you're going to draw up when you're feeling bad about yourself. Or you're feeling like you're massively behind in life. Because that's going to lead to a torturous plan where you're going to struggle with it and you're going to probably not follow through on it. And you're going to reinforce a sense of guilt and shame and unworthiness in yourself. Really, my approach to all this is the first thing is we want to get to the point where we're feeling like we're accepting of ourselves as who we are. But the first thing is no longer reinforcing the guilt that we are actually training ourselves to maintain. Right? Through all these bigger elaborate plans, not being able to follow through on it, never quite being able to finish it, maybe sometimes not even being able to start it. This is all gathering more evidence for our own guilt, our own unworthiness, and our own shame, like an iceberg, you know? We want to start melting that shame iceberg, because the root of all of this struggle is shame, unworthiness. I call it the defective story. That's the thing that leads to that big elaborate plan. And that's not a question of, you can't, the belief in it, you see, is that, well, okay, imagine we were able to just pull the cloak back and look at the unworthiness and the shame, and that's self-esteem, that low self-esteem, that low self-image that we have of unworthiness. The solution that's in there for all of that is that, well, I can compensate for it. I can do, I can achieve, overcome, impress, pull off miracles, somehow manage to turn that around, usually in the eyes of other people is what motivates us. But the thing is, you see, you can never actually get rid of that shame and that unworthiness or that defective story through doing. That's not how it works. It seems as if that's how it works. Absolutely, it seems that way. For sure, it does. But that's not how it works. because it's really a belief right and beliefs are actually very resistant to external the resistant to external evidence right if there's an un a shame thing in their uh self-image and you manage to pull off 15 things on your 72 list item which is impressive it's going to look at only 15 right um you did x y and z today but you didn't do that See, this is how the shame works. The shame doesn't look for reasons to affirm your worthiness. It's motivated. It has a bias to find reasons not to validate your worthiness, right? So it's nigh on impossible to act your way out, to achieve your way out, to personal productivity your way out of the shame and the unworthiness. It's about looking at that, the fact that their beliefs and finding ways to drop the beliefs. It's also really what it is, is imagine, okay, we have this unworthiness inside us, not good enough. The real way we get rid of that, we let that go, is changing how we relate to ourselves. Not true doing, right? How am I relating to myself? Am I treating myself as if I'm a person who is worthy? Now, I couldn't think of a worse way to relate to oneself than giving them 22 daily items that they need to take off a list. Does that sound loving? You know, would we do that to our worst enemy? Maybe not even, right? So it's like, okay, well, where's the love in how I'm relating to myself here? Or are there a list of demands that if I don't meet, I will be criticized heavily for? It's more about finding ways to be, yes, meeting our goals, meeting our needs, but doing it in a way that doesn't involve bulldozing or bullying or coercion or threatening ourselves. And when we're not doing that and we're relating to ourselves differently, that inner shame, that inner thing starts to fade off because you're relating to yourself differently, right? It's true relating. It's true love, basically, is how that gets released, okay? So yeah, back to my original point. If you're feeling heavy resistance today, I hope that you don't get those things ticked off your list because it will be the best thing for you in the long run because it's going to invite you to say, let's look within here. What's really going on? Let's try and understand what's happening today with how I'm feeling. Let's really reflect and try and understand some of this. Or at least let's not bulldoze. Let's not try and scramble and salvage things right now. Let's slow down a little bit and see if we can get to a place where I'm feeling inner calm and absence of a sense of pressure, maybe even getting to the point where I'm feeling at ease or I'm feeling like I can handle this, not pressured, and then stepping into action. And the process of doing that is not to scramble, it's to reject the scramble, it's to surrender the hustle and turn within to ourselves and start to relate to ourselves in a very different way. So There are my two cents on that. Maybe you could think of this video as next time you have a day, if you do have a day where the wheels fall off and things don't work, know that someone out there doesn't see that as a negative thing necessarily. Maybe it's a great, it's a wonderful thing. It's an opportunity for you to learn about yourself with the goal of ultimately, absolutely meeting our needs, attending to our goals, but in a way that isn't based on coercion. Right, and self-attack. There's a way of relating to ourselves in a healthy way that that can all happen. You don't have to give up on your goals or your needs. So hope that's useful. Thanks for being with me. If you want to learn more about my ideas and personal productivity, the link to my book is below. It's called After You Don't Show Up. You might find that useful also. Take care. Talk again soon. Bye-bye.